Southern-style green beans are one of my favorite side dishes. Sweet green beans are slowly simmered with bacon or ham so they pick up the great flavor of the smoky meat. When I was in college in Tennessee, we used to use canned green beans to speed up the process, but now I pick my beans out of the garden and simmer the fresh beans for an hour or two.
This sweet and smoky vegetable makes a great side to a Southern-style picnic with cornbread. Cooking the beans with bacon really makes a difference in the finished flavor, but if you want to make this dish vegetarian you can substitute 1 tablespoon of smoked paprika for the bacon and vegetable broth for the chicken broth.
Southern-style green beans
Ingredients
